Since I’ve got a pattern going so far, let’s keep at it: Step-By-Step snaps of the whole process. And I’ll try to keep this going until, well, until I don’t. I have to say it’s not exactly the easiest thing to set up a small photo studio in the even smaller kitchen and it needs a little planning. This may not always be possible. Today, it is.

So first sep: The sponge…

This is simply a bit of yeast, about half the total flour and 2.5c of warm water. It’s mixed up and left to bubble up for a couple of hours. Since it’s likely you’ve seen flour and water together before, I skipped the before picture and went straight to the exciting “all mixed” snap.

Like this:

Recipe number two in theThe Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge series is “Artos: Greek Celebration Breads“. In the preamble, Peter Reinhart tells how this is a holiday and festival bread that cover multiple variations.

The basic recipe is easily turned into “Christpsomos”, a Christmas loaf, by the simple additions of raisins, cranberries and walnuts or into “Lambropsomo”, an Easter loaf, by adding raisins, dried apricots and almond slivers a, braiding and nestling red-dyed hard boiled eggs. There are numerous local and not-so-local variations on this basic spiced bread.

I went with the christopsomos version since I did happen to have raising and cranberries, although I passed on the walnuts since we’re not big fans here.

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Since the first loaf inThe Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, blogged recently, was such a success, I decided that I’d give the recipe another go and this time keep track of the process with step-by-step pics.

It again proved to be a rather simple, straight forward loaf with little in the way of “tricky bits”. It does span several hours but as with most breads, that time is simply letting the dough rest or proof and it’s not time you need to babysit it.

So if you’re up to a play-by-play with photographic documentation, let’s get started.

The first step which I have no pics of (I’m sure you can picture it quite well in your heads) was to soak the coarse cornmeal for 12 hours. So I got my little bowl, my warm water and cornmeal and went to town. Ok, I just poured them in the bowl and covered. Not exciting. Fast forward to the next morning…

The next stage is to create the preferment, although I think technically this doesn’t qualify as it has the cornmeal in it, Regardless, I tossed the cornmeal mush into the bowl with about half the flour, instant yeast and a little more water.

Like this:

The very first loaf in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, (a.k.a. BBAC) the very first loaf in the book (alphabetically) and the very first loaf out of the new oven. How’s that for a pantload of firsts?

Anadama Loaf

So let’s recap what we have.

“The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge”, which you can read in more detail about in the linked post above, is basically a whole whack of people doing all the bread recipes in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice book by Peter Reinhart, all in order of appearance and on a weekly schedule (mostly). It’s more of a personal challenge, I think; there are no prizes or penalties (that I know of!) for doing every single recipe or skipping a couple but we’re all aiming to cover all 43 recipes at a pace of about one per week. So we’ll still be at this come February 2010, maybe a little later given there will likely be breaks for holiday baking and such.

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Today’s bake was, again, from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. As I had about 9 ounces leftover of the biga used in the Potato Rosemary bread, I decided to use it up for another loaf before it’s three days expiry ran out. Looking through the BBA, I saw a recipe that I could use it up with and decided on Italian Bread. I also saw that it was one of the doughs you could use for Grissini, Cool, two breads in one shot! So I made up a batch.

Once more, this was strictly following the recipe being my first time through. Made up the dough which was enough for two loaves, however, I made only one into a batard shape and the rest I rolled out and cut into breadsticks. By now, you’re probably pretty familiar with what a normal bread dough looks like so I’ll spare you that bit, but here’s the breadsticks, waiting for the loaf to come out of the oven so they could go in for a bake.

I simply took the dough and rolled it out to a size about as wide as the pan, then using a pizza wheel, cut small strips about 2cm wide. I rolled them up a little so they wouldn’t look like small planks, spread them on the sheet and sprinkled a mix of coarse black pepper, paprika and a little garlic powder on half, sesame seed on the other then a little coarse salt over the lot. Continue reading “Mambo Italiano”